Kids Getting Graded for Grit and Tenacity

Letter grades aren’t good enough for 21st century education that prepares kids for 21st century literacy and 21st century math obviously needed to prepare kids for the workplace of the future.

So we can be able to compete with China and all that.

So now many schools do standard-based grading to see how well students measure up with the new college-and-career ready standards that are Common Core. However to make sure our students can measure up with the super-dooper rigorous standards we need to make sure they have things like grit and tenacity.

Outside Harry Dewey Fundamental Elementary School in Fair Oaks, Amanda Christensen recalled the first time she saw the detailed report card for her three children.

“At first it was very complicated,” Christensen said. “You see all these new things and you don’t understand quite what they mean.”

Case in point: Her kids are now graded on their level of grit.

“What does my child have to do to get a grade in that?” she wondered.

Across the state, report cards are undergoing a sea change in how students are measured for academic performance. Where teachers once graded students on traditional math or English skills, they now judge attributes such as grit, gratitude or being sensitive to others.

Districts are changing their report cards to reflect the new Common Core State Standards, which are intended to move students away from rote learning and memorization. Rather, critical thinking and analysis geared toward deeper understanding of academic subjects are the goals….

….For those traditional academic subjects, teachers grade students on a 1-to-4 scale. But when it comes to attributes such as grit or being sensitive to others, they give students one of four marks: A for almost always, O for often, S for sometimes and R for rarely.

I just threw up in my mouth a little.

I don’t know if anything this utterly stupid requires comment. Obviously the education elite wunderkinds who dreamed this up didn’t think how entirely subjective and useless this is. But common sense has never stopped them before and I’m sure this time will be no different.

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Comments

Our youngest son’s school switched to standards based report cards this year. They chose to wait until the night of the open house (the day before school started) to inform parents of this. They waited another almost two months to send out info on what the ‘standards based’ reports cards were. As of January, students have not even gotten the promised M, A or N’s.. but only comments such as “doing well” or “participates in class”. I know this from talking to other parents – as we pulled out son out in November and transferred him to a private school because we’d had enough of this nonsense. It’s not an expense we can really afford, but it’s a price we’re willing to pay to ensure our son actually gets an education.

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